Case Number 27441: Small Claims Court

Evil Toons (1992)

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All Rise...

Judge Clark Douglas wants to go all Judge Doom on this flick.

The Charge

"I'll get you in the sequel for this!"

The Case

I'm going to go ahead and admit something: I requested Evil Toons as a
review assignment. No, this was not some nasty punishment inflicted upon me by
the powers-that-be. I have only myself to blame. Honestly, it was the
description which grabbed me: "It's Who Framed Roger Rabbit meets Evil Dead!" I mean, c'mon. That has to
be at least kind of fun, right? Or at least modestly interesting? Or at least
watchable? Nope, nope, nope.

Evil Toons is flat-out terrible. It's so bad that I have no idea how
they managed to get folks like Dick Miller (Gremlins) and David Carradine (Kill Bill: Volume 1) to appear in it,
despite the fact that those guys consistently demonstrated that they were
willing to appear in anything. The fact that the film is fully aware of its
cheesy awfulness does absolutely nothing to alleviate the situation, as the
script's smirking jokes are consistently clunky and obvious. For most of its
running time, the movie works hard to stretch a thin story filled with one-note
characters out to 82 minutes. Usually, the answer is, "Eh, let one of the
actresses take her top off and just kind of walk around onscreen for a
while."

Our story revolves around four young women who have been tasked with
cleaning an old house over the course of a single weekend. As long as they have
the place cleaned up by the time the owners get back, they'll each be paid $100.
Things go well enough at first, but midway through the weekend, a mysterious man
(Carradine) turns up and gives them a package bearing the words, "OPEN
IMMEDIATELY." The ladies do so, and discover that they've been given a very
old, mysterious book with a weird-looking cover. It's filled with sinister
drawings and a whole bunch of Latin text, but thankfully the smartest member of
the quartet (Monique Gabrielle, Bachelor Party) is fluent in Latin.
As you might expect, reading from the book causes an ancient evil force (which
appears in the form of a cheesy-looking animated monster) to come to life,
invade the body of one of the girls and go on a killing spree.

Maybe I'm just being unreasonable, but I don't think it's ridiculous to
expect a movie called Evil Toons to have more than three minutes of
animated footage over the course of its running time. Alas, the monster (billed
in the credits as The Monster) appears very briefly in only two scenes. In the
first, he ogles a naked woman and then rapes/possesses her. In the second, he
gets his just desserts (while vowing to get revenge in the sequel and quoting
lines from The Wizard of Oz). That's the
entirety of the evil toon action you're getting over the course of the film
(despite the fact that the title clearly promises more than one evil toon). The
rest of the time, you're just going to have to accept the fact that the violated
girl is possessed by an evil toon and is murdering people on the toon's
behalf.

Not that the film devotes much of its running time to something as
interesting as murder, mind you. Large portions of the movie are devoted to the
four lead actresses showing off their physical assets. "Wanna see how I
landed the captain of the football team?" one girl says. "Sure,"
the others reply. So begins a three-minute striptease. This makes one of the
girls feel inferior, so she wanders off to spend a couple of minutes examining
her breasts in a mirror. I realize that these actresses were all cast for their
willingness to get naked onscreen (their IMDb credits are littered with
low-budget softcore titles), but their actual performances are terrible even by
softcore cinema standards. In one scene, one of the girls has to pretend that
she's choking on a chicken sandwich. This would seem a pretty simple task, but
she somehow manages to deliver the world's most unconvincing portrait of a
person choking on a chicken sandwich I've ever seen. In another scene, one of
the women reads a frightening book. To indicate that it's frightening, she makes
loud noises as she turns the pages: "Ooooooohhhh! Ahhh! Oh! Hmmmm.
Oooooohhh!" You know, like a normal person.

The girls aren't the only ones asked to provide needless filler. There are
four or five scenes in which David Carradine stands outside the house, wearing a
black cloak and mugging for the camera in an ominous fashion. He never actually
does anything in these scenes, but they are included to remind us that David
Carradine signed up to be in this movie. His big dialogue scenes (which appear
at the beginning and the end) are awfully clunky, but at least they move the
plot forward. Dick Miller has even less to do, so he's granted a scene in which
he watches an old movie on TV which just so happens to star…Dick Miller!
"This guy should have won an Academy Award," he sighs. This is a
five-second joke, but the film stretches it out to two minutes because, hey,
this isn't a short film. Arte Johnson (Laugh-In) also shows up for a few
minutes, hamming it up and leering at the ladies in his small role as a pervy
neighbor.

Evil Toons looks awful, honestly. The image is so blurry and soft
that it often seems as if you're watching an old VHS tape (which seems like the
appropriate format for this sort of thing). There's a bit more detail during the
brief semi-animated sequences, but otherwise things look pretty messy. The Dolby
2.0 stereo track isn't any better, delivering dialogue which often sounds
muffled and an enthusiastic musical score which is undone due to being performed
on cheap-sounding synthesizers. Supplements include an audio commentary with
director Fred Olen Ray, a making-of featurette, a peculiar "Nite Owl
Parody" short, a photo gallery, a suite of music from the score and a
trailer.